Musings of an Englishman living in the USA. Job hunting, writing, random thoughts and anything else that strikes my fancy.

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He’d heard one of those cowboy actors say that. It was either Clint Eastwood or John Wayne. Right now, Scott couldn’t remember which. Either way, he thought, they were wrong. Scott leaned on the shovel and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the flannel sleeve of his shirt. He was drenched. He’d give anything to have someone else dig this damned hole for him.

Scott thrust the shovel into the ground, more reddish mud spattered against the bottom of his ragged black jeans. He’d either have to get them straight in the laundry or just toss them in the trash. Stomping on the top of the shovel’s blade with a steel-capped boot and feeling it reverberate up his leg, Scott moved another shovelful of dirt.

As far as he was concerned there were only three good reasons for digging a hole. Here in the twenty-first century, Scott worked as a bank teller rather than a pirate of the Barbary Coast, and so was unlikely to be burying a wooden chest full of doubloons. Hell, he’d never even seen a doubloon and he worked with money literally every day.

That meant his first good reason, digging up buried treasure, no longer counted as good and hadn’t for close to three hundred years.

His second good reason would be to plant something. After all, there were always plenty of people using the allotments in the community garden center the city council opened last summer. Scott frequently saw women (it was nearly always women, for some reason) carrying shovels around. They had to be digging something. Based on half the cooking shows he caught on the TV, Scott figured the women were all planting some green weed called “kale.”

If anyone had ever said Scott had a green thumb, then either they were lying, or Scott had caught an unfortunate infection in the hand. He knew he wasn’t a gardener. Hell, even the cacti and artificial plants he’d tried to take care of withered and died.

That left Scott with exactly one good reason to dig a hole, to hide something. Scott chuckled to himself, as that was kind of the reason he had been digging for the past couple of hours. It also explained why he wasn’t able to hire someone to do this particular menial task for him. Another firm stomp on the shovel’s blade sent the vibration up his leg and the tool’s wooden handle bucked against his hand burying a splinter in the fleshy arc around the base of his thumb. Scott cursed, dropped the shovel, which bounced against the ground, and started to pull the wooden slivers out of his hand.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Scott said, “No bad one either, I guess.” Scott manhandled the plastic-wrapped body of his wife into the freshly dug hole and started to shovel the red dirt back into place.

“They’ll never know you’re here,” he spat at the corpse.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “Three Good Reasons.” A It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.

It smelled like pork roasting in a barbecue pit. The crackling sounded like the campfires of his youth in the boy scouts. If not for the searing pain as the flesh bubbled and burned away from Seth’s legs, it would be pleasantly nostalgic.

As things stood, though, being cast into the pit of fire was an exercise in pain tolerance. Aside from the agony as his lower legs burned through to the nerves and bone, Seth’s lungs screamed as he tried to breath through the belching plumes of jet-black smoke. He coughed, involuntarily and tried to hold his breath out of habit.

Intellectually, Seth knew that he no longer had a physical form that needed to breathe or feel pain, yet the spectral form he assumed was his soul thought otherwise. He knew himself to be as insubstantial as the black smoke that filled the pit, but somehow whatever remained of his brain was telling him that he was in an unending tumult of pain and fire. Seth clawed at his ethereal throat as once again his spirit tried to breathe through the thick, dark fumes.

How had he gotten here?

Intensive care nurse Sarah Chapel shook the thermometer, willing the mercury to settle at a saner temperature number. The red gauge in the thermometer was bubbling as the fluid began boiling. There was no way the patient had a temperature of over six hundred degrees and a regular heartbeat.

As Sarah went to dispose of the obviously faulty thermometer, the unmistakable smell of smoke buffeted her nostrils. She turned to look at Seth Adams’ bed as it erupted into flames. As the hospital’s sprinkler systems kicked on, she heard the distinctive whine of a flat line from the patient’s EKG monitor.

Nurse Chapel tried to help put the fire out, and wondered why there weren’t any doctors nearby to officially pronounce Adams dead.

What the hell had happened?

Seth reached a pain singularity. The inferno consuming him had overloaded his nerve endings and he could no longer feel pain, or anything else. His spirit was as numb as his spectral body. He stared ahead with dull, lifeless eyes.

The smoke wreathing him began coalescing into a coherent form. At first, two snake-like eyes formed level with Seth’s own. The thing took shape, starting with three spiraling smoky horns jutting from the top of its head. From within the noxious vapors, a fanged mouth distended into existence. As the form in the darkness developed wings of shadow, it spoke, its voice a multitude of sepulchral tongues speaking out of synch.

“Seth Adams,” it boomed with a thousand echoes, “your world has forsaken you as it has for so many before you.”

Seth barely managed to choke out a strangled “Why?”

The smoke form’s eyes bored into Seth’s own as a cacophony of its voices breathed, “You know why. Remember.”

Seth saw the naked crimson body of his wife with stab wounds in her abdomen. His hand held a bloody knife.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “Suitably Warm.” A It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.

She always wore candy apple red lipstick. Ethan never knew why, but every time she came in, those candy apple red lips stood out against her pale skin. She didn’t wear any other makeup.

Ethan sipped at his bourbon and coke, looking at her across the bar. He hoped she noticed him, without noticing him looking at her. He’d been coming here after work every day for three months. Three months of wistful glances and cheap booze for a pair of red lips that didn’t know he existed.

Her eyes drifted over to him. Ethan immediately looked at his wrist, hoping that she couldn’t tell he didn’t have a watch on.

An hour, and two bourbons and cokes later she slipped away from the bar and walked out to the street. Ethan noticed that her high heels were the same candy apple red as her lipstick.

Ethan gave himself a couple of minutes before following her outdoors. The doorway was wreathed in blue-grey cigarette smoke. He bent at the shoulders as he coughed. Ethan stood up, straightened his tie and muttered a prayer to himself. He let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and walked over to her. She was leaning in the doorway of the sushi restaurant over the road and talking on a cell phone.

“No, Rick,” she said in a surprisingly deep voice, “I said 10:30 TONIGHT. It’s been two damn weeks, you had plenty of time to make arrangements,” she said.

Ethan caught himself smiling and tried to bury it before she could spot him eavesdropping on her. He strode forward, and gave her a nod of familiarity as he walked past. He pushed on the door of the restaurant as if to go in. Unfortunately, the door was locked as the place was closed.

She laughed. “You’re going to have to get your California roll somewhere else,” she said. Her voice was just loud enough for Ethan to hear.

“I guess so,” he said.

“Let’s cut the bullshit. I’ve seen you watching me for a while now. I don’t know why you haven’t at least come over to say ‘hi’ or anything,” she said

“Sure. If you’re buying, I might let you call me Jackie by the end of the meal. Give me a call.” Jacqueline gave Ethan her phone number. He returned the favor.

The next night, Ethan slunk to the bar again. He looked around for Jacqueline and her candy apple red lips. She wasn’t there. Ethan slid into a darkened corner booth and dialed her number.

Immediately, something exploded in the parking lot. Running outside, he saw a Volkswagen Beetle burning. It was candy apple red.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “Candy Apple Red.” A It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.

For months now, the world stank of piss and putrefying flesh. The constant drum-roll of German shell impacts drowned out the buzzing of a billion angry flies. But what really bothered Private Liam Jenkins was the omnipresent mud. The filthy stuff coated everything and you never truly got clean. At the rate things were going, he’d still be breathing this foul mud by the year 2000.

He hoped that he would escape out of this Belgian shit-hole by then. A hubbub of activity among the non-commissioned officers sure made it seem like they had heard something from the brass. He assumed that old Haig had given the order to go over the top and hoped to God that the Hun’s machine guns would make Jenkins’ inevitable death come quick.

Not like Thompson, whose death seemed to stretch on for hours. The only reason he knew it wasn’t days was because the sun never set. Jenkins ended the man’s burbling screams of agony with a bullet to his throat. He could still the body entangled in the barbed wire.

He could remember when enlisting seemed like a good idea, back when a young woman handed him a white feather. She branded him a coward for not “fighting for King and country.” What the King wanted with this rain-soaked bog of shit, mud and corpses eluded Jenkins. Still, the Kaiser obviously gave it some importance, so Jenkins and the rest of his unit tried to take it back inch by painful inch.

By the flurry of activity, Jenkins assumed the unit were about to fight for another inch. He wiped the grime off his wedding ring and kissed it. He doubted he’d see his Lizzy again. Three men either side of him knelt in prayer. It’s true, Jenkins thought, there really are no atheists in foxholes. Jenkins didn’t know what he believed about God, but he damn sure believed in Hell. He’d lived in it since the mid February.

Two minutes later, as the setting sun bathed the mud-choked battlefield in an ugly crimson hue, Jenkins finished answering nature’s call and pulled the duckboards away. As he clambered out of the trench, his foot stomped down on gristle and bone of a severed arm. A fading stripe on the sleeve suggested the arm had once belonged to a corporal. Jenkins kicked it away as he crept on to the battlefield, his rifle at the ready.

He felt the shock wave of what he fervently hoped was the last artillery shell launched at the German lines seconds before he heard the roar of impact. Maybe it would kill a few of the enemy, or better yet, flatten some of the infernal barbed wire. Jenkins slithered forward on his stomach, trying not to think about the staccato bullets of the enemy machine guns as he advanced. Then came pain and blood as his earlobe ripped away.

Unable to go on, Jenkins stood up and bolted back past his own lines as bullets zipped all around.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “shreds of doubt.” It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.

The mud stained Sandra’s fingernails as she scratched at the rain-soaked ground. The soft earth gave way to her frenzied digging until she banged her fingers against the ash wood box. Her tears mingled with the raindrops beating against the box lid. Sandra pulled the box against her, leaving an ugly brown stain on her dark blue dress. She headed inside, prising the battered lid off the box on her way.

Sandra curled up on her battered leather sofa and spread the contents of the box on her coffee table. Two moldering photographs, a pair of friendship bracelets and a rough grey stone with “Caitlin + Sandra 4ever” scrawled on it crudely in white chalk. Sandra gripped the stone tightly, feeling its coarseness against her palm. She found the grittiness against her skin oddly comforting. She raised her eyes heavenward and began to whisper.

“Will you remember me when I see you again? I know I could never forget you. I tried for a while.” Sandra took a deep breath and picked up the first photograph.

She turned it over and looked at the back of the yellowing print. The words “Dewey Beach vacation, June 12, 1983” were scribbled on the back in felt tip pen. Had it really been that long? Sandra wondered. It felt like yesterday. She turned the photograph around and looked at the picture of the two of them. In her mind they had been children, looking towards Mom’s old Kodak camera and flashing matching gap-toothed smiles. The girls in the picture looked older, almost in their teens and something about Caitlin’s eyes made her look ineffably older. Those eyes looked as world-weary as Sandra felt, sitting their holding a memory three decades old.

The other photograph lay face down on the table. Sandra couldn’t bring herself to look at that one yet. Instead, she picked up the braided friendship bracelets with their red, white and blue almost painfully bright in the dark, storm-lit room. She inhaled them and just for a moment she could smell that distant summer again. The salt air, the artificial sweetness of cotton candy and the coconut smell of Caitlin’s suntan lotion. For a moment, the years disappeared and Sandra became the devil-may-care child in the photograph again. Her sigh broke the illusion and brought her back to the here and now, with rain beating a grim tattoo against her windows.

“We were supposed to last forever,” she said. The room swallowed the words into oppressive silence. Steeling herself, Sandra turned over the second photograph. This one didn’t have anything written on it, instead the date was printed on the photo in impersonal sans serif type. “06 January, 2003.” The black and white photograph only pictured Caitlin, those same ineffable eyes stared lifelessly at the Medical Examiner’s camera, framing the bloody opening of Caitlin’s fatal wound.

“We were supposed to last forever.” Sandra murmured, closing her eyes.

Sandra still gripped the second photograph tight three days later when her sons found her body on the couch.

The inspiration for this piece of 500-word Flash Fiction was a prompt I found online (I forget the site, or I would link it) that read “why didn’t it happen to me?” Apparently, I was feeling rather maudlin in my interpretation of it. It’s a first draft, but feedback and comments are always welcomed.

Contemplation

Melissa wiped away her tears with her bare forearm. The last time she had cried in public was her first day of kindergarten, a decade ago. That too had been about her mother. Of course, this time they weren’t going to be reuniting at the end of the day. Melissa leaned back on the rock she sat on and stared upwards.

It was an almost cloudless sky, a few white wisps crossing the sun beams. Melissa thought of it as a happy sky, which angered her. How dare nature by happy on this day? Melissa imagined that she glimpsed at heaven and Mom stared back.

The phone call to school wasn’t exactly unexpected. Melissa’s mother had lived, no had existed – it wasn’t really living – with inoperable pancreatic cancer for two years, and six months ago she had abandoned any pretense of treatment.

So when Melissa got the news she dreaded, that her mother had lost the battle, she had been excused from school and made her way to Brown’s Island where she sat in what had been Mom’s favorite spot and wept. Now that she had cried out all the tears she had, Melissa felt she could be strong for her father and the eight-year-old twins.

She was the only woman of the house now, and she felt she needed to be the rock that supported her family.

“I don’t know how you did it, Mom” she said to the sky, “but I’ll always do my best for you.”

The origin of this piece was once again from the Richmond WriMos Facebook group. One of the members posted the image below and challenged the members to come up with a 250 word story based on that image. Because I tend to overwrite and then pare down, my story above is exactly 250 words. It’s also a a first draft, but as ever, all comments are welcomed.

On the other paw

Delilah stretched out her paws and popped out her claws. She gave her human a playful rake down his lap.

“Ow, damn cat!” her human muttered and shoved Delilah off of him. She dropped from the chair.

Her body hit the floor and as she looked around, she realized everything she’d been looking for was hers. It didn’t mean she had to like her human, but sometimes she did. Usually the times when he filled her bowl with food. Sometimes, Delilah was able to trick her human into filling it up more than once a day, and those were the best days.

Still, he had just shoved her to the floor. Usually this meant her human was angry, and the red welts Delilah’s claws left on his legs backed that up. The smart move would be running away for a while, and Delilah certainly thought of herself as smart.

Delilah poked her way through the cat flap and into the great outdoors. She immediately regretted her decision as fat drops of rain spattered from the night sky and thumped against her fur in wet bursts. Feeling somewhat bedraggled, she let out a great yowl of frustration. Her voice echoed across the narrow alley, reverberating with strange harmonics before it reached back to Delilah’s ears. An undercurrent of some other sound set Delilah’s teeth on edge. She wasn’t alone in the alleyway.

The other presence showed itself. A hugely fat ginger tomcat with a torn up right ear oozing pus padded towards Delilah. The tom’s hazel eyes narrowed as he bared his yellowing teeth.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he purred menacingly.

Delilah tucked her tail underneath her stomach and shivered. She told herself that it was due to the weather, but even she didn’t believe that. Delilah squatted on her haunches and leapt over the ginger monster. As she landed, she skidded up to speed and tried to bolt out of the alleyway.

The orange cat hissed his frustration and pivoted to give chase. Despite its size, the tom cat was fast and quickly closed the gap on Delilah. A quick swipe of his left forepaw sent a shot of agony into Delilah’s rear thigh. A thin trickle of blood sluiced down the fur of her leg and splattered against the dirty puddles of rainwater.

Delilah yowled in pain as she tried to run. She couldn’t put her full weight on her rear leg anymore and hobbled as she attempted to turn and head back indoors to the warm safety of her human’s lap. Jumping the ginger tom wasn’t an option. Delilah saw the tom coming at her and flattened herself to the ground. As her opponent approached her prone form, Delilah stretched her neck out and bit down hard at the creature’s throat.

The tom screeched a bubbling cry of pain.

Delilah didn’t look back as she limped away from the angry ginger cat and towards her human’s house. She pushed her head through the flap and dragged herself indoors.

The origin of this piece was that I realized I’d been stuck in a non-writing rut for a while and needed some inspiration to break out of it. To that end I posted in the Richmond WriMos Facebook group asking for a prompt so that I can “bang out a 500 worder.” I received two prompts, and this is my response to the second prompt which was ” Her body hit the floor and as she looked around, she realized everything she’d been looking for …..“

The piece above is 500 words according to Microsoft Word, which isn’t a bad length for flash fiction. It’s also very much a first draft, so please keep that in mind.